-LRB- CNN -RRB- -- We celebrate Veterans Day this week , but we have been riding a crest of war remembrance for months now . World War I 's centenary alone has brought forth new books -- histories of that war , based on historical documentation and letters unearthed in family and state archives . We look anew at the inscriptions on tombs of known and unknown soldiers and posters from the past whose propagandistic messages shout at us across the divide of time .

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But in the midst of this flood of words , an equally significant , and telling , aspect of the Great War has been largely overlooked : the place of silence in and around the conflict .

World War I may call to mind the written word -- the harrowing verses of Wilfred Owen or the prose of Erich Maria Remarque , whose `` All Quiet on the Western Front '' rendered war 's raw brutality . But the experiences of the years 1914-1918 in fact enshrined the notions that language can not adequately express the experience of combat , that the veteran will often remain silent about war , even to his or her own family , that the speech of soldiers -- the euphemisms and slang used on the battlefield , the coded communications used after , among veterans -- leaves out as much as it reveals .

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This notion of war as an inaccessible space may seem almost antiquated today , when civilian smartphones and video cameras produce a continual feed of chaotic combat situations . But much of what goes on in military operations remains unknown to those who were not there . The connections between silence and war still hold among soldiers -- for reasons of security , censorship , military culture and enduring mechanisms of human psychology .

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In 2014 , as in 1914 , many veterans keep quiet about what are their most life-changing experiences . There is , for one thing , the trauma ; there is also the desire to protect one 's family . There is guilt over killing -- and guilt over surviving . And there is the sheer difficulty of how to explain it : how to put an exceptional state into everyday language .

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World War I was a watershed in this regard , modeling , during the course of the conflict , what could and could not be said about war by combatants . Some silences were strategic : Soldiers knew their communications home would be censored , and it was unwise to appear defeatist or unpatriotic by conveying the horrors of the battlefield .

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Others refused speech as a way of respecting the war experience of fallen comrades . War poetry is vocal on the need for restraint to counter the rhetoric of heroism produced by those far from the front . In his 1915 poem `` When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead , '' Charles Hamilton Sorley scorned the use of `` soft words '' about those who could not speak back : `` Say only this , ` They are dead . ' / Then add thereto , / ` Yet many a better one has died before . ' ... ''

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Most combatants could not come up with the words , soft or hard , to communicate to those back home what lay around them : carnage on an unprecedented scale . With many new weapons , and others used on a mass scale for the first time in history , World War I inaugurated a new human experience of battle and devastating new injuries .

Even the educated felt that language failed them to convey the sights and smells of bodies rent by machine gun fire , devastated by bombs from the air , blistered from gas or paralyzed by shell shock . `` I can not find words to translate my impressions . Hell can not be so terrible , '' wrote the French lieutenant Alfred Joubaire in his diary , unable to draw comparisons with any known reality .

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The writings , drawings and other artifacts that flowed from the front grappled not only with the question of how to rise to these expressive challenges , but whether it is even possible to communicate this new reality to the noncombatant .

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Henri Barbusse reflected on this futility in his 1916 novel `` Under Fire , '' which originated from notes taken during his time at the front . `` It 'll be no good telling about it , eh ? They would n't believe you ... no one can know it . Only us , '' remarks one soldier . `` No , not even us , not even us ! , '' another responds . `` We 've seen too much to remember ... We 're not made to hold it all . ''

Traumatic repression , the veterans ' despair at being understood , the affirmation of a special bond of knowledge and experience among comrades -- all familiar struggles from our modern wars . They are all here , in 1916 -- violence of a scope that exceeded comprehension . Indeed , Barbusse 's scene ends with the rueful reflection that this war was something `` you ca n't give a name to . ''

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Both the modern figure of the literary witness and the modern figure of the mute veteran emerged from this early 20th-century conflagration -- as with Barbusse , they were often one and the same - and with them the notion of war as something too overwhelming to tell .

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Of course , this situation was not unique to the Great War . A study released in August by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs , which reveals the prolonged post-traumatic stress among Vietnam veterans -- home from war for 40 years now -- reminds us of that .

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And so it 's fitting that from 1919 onward , World War I 's November 11th Armistice has been marked in many countries through two minutes of silence and has been expanded to include the veterans of all wars .

The words of World War I can enlighten us about the conflict 100 years later . But the spaces of silence around the din of all wars can tell us much about war 's toll on those who wage it -- in 2014 as in 1914 .

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Ruth Ben-Ghiat : Veterans Day brings words of remembrance . For many , words do n't work

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She says vets keep quiet about their life-changing experience ; others would not understand

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She says WWI enshrined this notion . The horrors , and guilt over killing , too great to describe

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Ben-Ghiat : It 's fitting Veterans Day calls for 2 minutes of silence -- to quietly mark the din of war